Plant roots are receiving more attention of late and well they should. Roots are the foragers that deliver water and nutrients to the plant, but too often our attitude is “out of sight, out of mind.”
With the current interest in many plant species, cover crops and soil health, much of it comes down to what happens with roots. We hope soil health enthusiasts will enjoy seeing the anatomy of the roots that feed the plant and maintain the soil.
The mycorrhizal fungi in the rhizosphere (the area next to the root) play a big role in getting nutrients to the plant. Our switch to zero till has allowed them to flourish. Our University of Saskatchewan is embarking on a big program to learn more about how roots do their thing and how we might intervene to the plants’, and our, advantage. Much of that is “inside” work — learning about how the plant roots and soil organisms interact in artificial systems.
It makes sense to me that we should know something about how roots grow in natural, outdoor, systems before doing the close up work. A lot of good work has been done in this area.
The reader may wonder why I talk about work that was done before I even entered university and by folks that have been pushing daisies for 60 years. The information is “old enough to be good” and no one is doing such work today.
The big actors in documenting the big picture, the gross anatomy of roots and the physical nature of crop and native plant root systems were Pavlychenko and Weaver. Since their work from the 1920s to the 1950s, no one has even come close to what they did, except for the Austrian connection.
Source: www.grainews.ca